The Marriage Portrait(117)

She finds herself, from the corner of her eye, examining his hands: their blunt nails, the pad of muscle behind the thumb, the articulated bones joining digit to palm, the ring on his smallest finger, engraved with Alfonso’s eagle crest. They seem to her, at that moment, extraordinarily powerful, with a sickening, large span.

Baldassare uses one of these hands to raise the lantern above his head. He peers along the corridor. He turns to check behind him, once more.

Then, raking his fingers through his hair, he moves off, away from her, walking fast, as if in a hurry to get to where he is going.

She waits until the darkness has swallowed him, until the stone walls of the fortezza have stopped echoing with his footsteps, then slips down the final few stairs, and is out into the corridor, moving in the opposite direction to Baldassare.

She doesn’t have long, she doesn’t have long. If Baldassare is up and awake, intent on some action, there is a chance that others are, too. Perhaps some officials, perhaps servants. Even Alfonso himself.

To reach the kitchens, she must first pass the door to the hall. As she gets nearer, she thinks of the portrait, how it will be in there, propped up, ready to be hung. She wonders what will happen to it, how it will fare, after she is dead. Will Alfonso send it back to the castello? Will it be hung somewhere? Will he look at it sometimes? Will the eyes stare back at him, interrogatively, and will he be able to bear this?

Keeping close to the edges of the corridor, she goes past the hall door, around the corner, down a slope, and through a low doorway.

The kitchen is in stasis. Hams are suspended from the ceiling. Pots lie upturned on the table, next to a partially eaten loaf. An ashy cone of embers smoulders in the large grate. A basket of onions, encased in their dry and aetiolated jackets, lies abandoned on a stool. On the floor by the fire, two servants sleep on woven mats, wrapped in cloaks, hats pulled down over their faces.

She stands by the table, her hand on the humped back of the loaf. She should go back upstairs now. There is the door, behind her, leading back into the fortezza. Perhaps all may still be well. Perhaps she is mistaken as to Alfonso’s intentions. She might conceive a child, she might bear an heir, she might continue as a duchess. She might.

It comes back to her, then, as a fully formed thought, what Jacopo had said to her as he stood beside her in the hall, his hand on her shoulder. He would stuff the servants’ exit with rags and wait for her in the forest.

She winces at the recollection, giving her head a shake. So ludicrous. How could such a thing be possible? The idea that the perimeter of a fortezza like this could be so easily punctured, that Alfonso would permit any such breach to his security, verges on ridiculous. An artist’s apprentice could never conceive of the lengths men like Alfonso go to in ensuring their safety. There are guardsmen with him all the time, she could have said, there are people whose very job it is to patrol and secure his buildings, every day and every night. They would never, ever miss a thing as simple as an unlocked door.

Lucrezia takes up the bread and stows it in her apron pocket. She skims several slices of cured ham from a plate and places them next to the bread.

Then she hesitates. Behind her waits the silent fortezza, her chamber, her sketches, her husband, his guards, the wandering Baldassare. In front of her is the kitchen, the sleeping servants, the low-burning fire, and a hatch-like exit recessed into the thick defensive wall. This must be the door that Jacopo talked about, the one that admitted him and Maurizio, and the route by which they left.

It is squarish, made of thick planks bolted together, and it draws the eye, like the vanishing point in a sketch.

There is no way, she tells herself, that Jacopo’s plan would have worked, even if he had spoken in earnest, even if he had tried. The idea that rags could triumph over all that Alfonso has at his disposal, the thought that an apprentice could outwit the efforts of a duke, his men, his trained guards, a stone fortezza built to withstand attack, is nothing less than madness.

Despite all this, here she is, stepping past the slumbering servants, and grappling in the dim light with a thick iron bolt, then another, then a third, her fingers reading their length and breadth, then easing them back. Then she grasps the iron ring of the handle. Will it turn? Was Jacopo serious when he said he would disable the lock?

She tries to twist it. It will not yield, and she is not surprised, not at all, not disappointed or let down, not even a little, because she was not expecting it to. Still, she decides to try the other way, just in case, one final time, before she goes back upstairs, with her improvised meal, to face whatever will come, for she has no choice. She has never had any choice. So she gives the handle one final testing turn, and she feels—she can hardly believe it, she must be imagining it—a sliding, a shifting, deep within the mechanism. There is a quiet clunk, and then the handle yields.

She stands there. She takes a breath, then another. She inserts her fingers into the lock and extracts the rags she finds, one by one, holding up their crumpled, oily lengths in disbelief. How incredible, how unlikely, that such frail things could jam the mechanism of a heavy iron lock. She pulls the door towards her, experimentally, for it cannot be unlocked, it cannot. Alfonso would never permit such a lapse, such a risk. The idea of an entrance or exit to his domain being left unsecured like this is preposterous.

The door swings towards her, just a little, just enough to admit a breeze from the outside, active and sprightly, eddying in through the gap and swirling its way into the kitchen behind her.